Judith Butler: Performative Acts and Gender Constitution
From Critical Practice Chelsea
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Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” In The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader. 2nded. Edited by Michael Huxley and Noel Witts. London: Routledge, 1996. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” is a paper in four parts:
Butler begins her discussion by aligning performativity with philosophy rather than theatre, a politically charged distinction further discussed below. Illocutionary gestures (Searl’s speech acts [analytic philosophy of language]), action theory (a domain of moral philosophy concerned with what one ought to do), and the phenomenological theory of the “act” provide the backdrop for her theory of gender as socially constructed and thus subject to reconfiguration. Tethering her argument to Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman” (Butler,120), a phrase reappearing several times throughout the text, Butler asserts that gender involves the stylized repetition of acts. Far from natural (innate), these acts are socialized—socialized, moreover, with the express purpose of normalizing heterosexual identity. Complicating this claim is Butler’s contention that gender constitution through performative acts tends to be internally discontinuous. These acts do not so much represent subjectivity as it is (which would make them internally continuous); instead they reflect how it should be, a process that Butler asserts must be understood in terms of persuasion: performative acts “constitute…identity as a compelling illusion, an object of belief” that is aligned with social sanction and taboo” (1996, 120). In revealing how “normative” acts of gender perpetuate “normative” notions of gender, Butler seeks to demystify gender as anything but normative and in so doing open up possibilities for contesting and transgressing the reified significance of heterosexual gender as normative. In the second part of this essay titled “Sex/gender: feminist and phenomenological views,” the body is framed as a construction situated in time and space. Returning again to de Beauvoir’s observation that “woman” is a role that females (typically) assume through socialization, and summoning Merleau Ponty’s claim that the body is “an historical idea,” not a “natural species” (Butler, 121), Butler situates gender in relation to the historical possibilities that circumscribe both its significance and capacity. Consequently, “One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors as well” (Butler, 122). After briefly discussing embodiment in terms of gender as a corporeal style, Butler ruminates on the significance of the body as a cultural sign, with gender being a political strategy for survival. Those who fail to enact normative models of gender are punished; those who conform to dominant models of gender are affirmed. However disconcerting, coming to terms with this as a heterosexual involves implicating oneself in the tyranny of heteronormalcy (Butler, 123). To repeat the above, Butler’s argument is that heterosexuality is anything but factic; the body’s enactment of sexuality bears meanings, dramatic meaning, and this meaning is bound up with belief. “The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness (Butler, 123).” With cycle of performance-persuasion-performance demystified, Butler’s project now involves proposing strategies for transcending this loop. At this point, Butler asks the question: “How useful is a phenomenological point of departure for a feminist description of gender?” Suffice it to say for my purposes here that both Butler’s sense of performativity and feminism’s emancipatory program share an interest in embodiment as a way of grounding identity in lived experience. Both approaches address the personal as political “…insomuch as it is conditioned by shared social structures [and] the personal [is] also immunized against political challenge to the extent that public/private distinctions endure” (Butler, 124). And they both attempt to make visible “that which is not seen” by the dominant order [read: patriarchy]. At the same time, Butler is cautious about collapsing all women into the category of “women” (and by extension, all queer subjectivities into the identifier, “queer”), as doing so effaces the lived experience of individuals—their embodied realities. Could the same be true of collaboration? Is there a tendency to see those engaged in this kind of activity as “collaborators” first and foremost, and if so, what does this mean? It is my sense there is a tendency to observe people’s performance as collaborators, to assess their behavior based on how well they fulfill this “job description,” even in instances where their work goes unpaid. Certainly, there are general assumptions about what constitutes “a collaborator” in the same way there are general assumptions about what constitutes “a woman.” It might, therefore, be useful to unpick these assumptions and assess how they operate in the service of advanced capitalist culture (Brian Holmes’ notion of the “flexible personality” would be useful here). Compiling case studies about the interplay between the lived experiences of individuals and their performances as creative collaborators might also help to tease out tensions between different aspects of their embodiment. This is assuming, of course, that being a collaborator is only one of several roles these individuals assume. This brings me to Butler’s distinction between gender performance in theatrical and non-theatrical contexts. After asserting that heterosexual bias hinges on reproduction and kinship systems, Butler observes that the stage is one space where gender transgression is acceptable. In an argument similar to bell hooks’ assertion that blacks are tolerated in nonessential professions, such as entertainment and sport as opposed to loci of power including politics and education, Butler argues theatrical acts of gender transgression are appreciated because they are unlikely to be perceived as “real” and thus a “real” threat to social conventions. “In the theatre, one can say, ‘this is just an act,’ and de-realize that act, make it into something quite distinct from what is real” (Butler, 128). On the bus, however, the same act may be perceived as threatening. Like gender the status quo is neither given nor innate. It does not proceed itself; it does not preexist its performance. Similarly, argues Butler, gender is not expressive of some preexisting identity. It is performative of an interiority which is itself “a publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication” (129). Butler’s (gendered) subjectivity differs from Erving Goffmann’s view of the self (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) as exchanging and assuming various roles within the practice of life because for Butler, gendered subjectivity not only transcends discrete roles it is also constructed in compliance with heavily internalized regulations of socially appropriate gender identity. Thinking this through further in relation to both Goffmann’s notion of roles and Sherry Turkle’s ideas about distributed presence conditioned by using a cascade of desktop windows (Life on the Screen, 11) could prove useful for coming to terms with the construction and performance of collaborative identities. Returning to my task at hand: “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” concludes with a tour de force. Butler again wrestles with the relationship between her partial theory of gender and the broad church of feminism and its political program. Again taking aim at the feminist use of “woman” as a descriptor-cum-political-tool-cum-univocal-point-of-view, she not only draws attention to the ontological insufficiency of the term but also calls for a critical genealogy of the complex institutional and discursive means through which the presupposition of the category of woman itself is constituted (Foucault’s influence). She cautions, however, against this genealogy reifying gender as binary and heterosexuality as natural, demanding instead for an understanding of gender as “…not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy” (132). Gender is something performed and performed as a continuous act. To deny this, argues Butler, would be to relinquish “…power to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performance of various kinds” (132), which seems to be her ultimate goal. Significance to my research: The relevance of Butler’s text resides primarily in both her sense of identity as performative (rather than expressive) and in her claim on peformativity as a tool for broadening the cultural field. So what, if any, are the problems with applying performativity to collaboration in the same way Butler applies it to gender? Admittedly, social notions of collaboration are not as deeply inscribed as those of gender. But this does not mean the term “collaboration” is free from connotations. The word “collaborator” has been inflected with new significance since WW2. Fully recuperated by neo-liberalism, today it resonates positively as a “progressive” way of working. The word once used to brand someone a traitor, a “collaborator” is now more likely to reference a helpful friend. This aside, the core commonality between gender and collaboration resides in the phenomenological theory of acts. Drawing on Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and George Herbert Mead, Butler seeks to understand the quotidian ways in which “…social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture and above all the symbolic social sign” (120). So, to revisit an idea floated above, what are the limits of conceptualizing collaboration in terms of acts and how might critiques of Butler’s theory of acts be helpful in determining these limits? I was recently amused to read two scathing quotes confirming one of my problems with Butler’s performativity: despite her assertions otherwise, this theory denies the materiality of the body or, to use Butler’s term, the “facticity” of the body. The first of these is from Camille Paglia, whose plain dislike for Butler is palpable in her prose. The post-feminist observes: She started a career in philosophy, abandoned that, and has been taken as this sort of major philosophical thinker by people in literary criticism. But has she ever made any exploration of science? For her to be dismissing biology, and to say gender is totally socially constructed — where are her readings, her studies? It's all gameplay, wordplay, and her work is utterly pernicious, a total dead-end. (Interview by Daniel Nester) The second comes from Michel Callon’s reference to Annemarie Mol’s critique of Butler in Callon’s “What does it mean to say that economics is performative?”: … Mol is not convinced by Butlerian analysis. According to her, this conception brackets of the crucial role played in the production of identities by entites, such as the vagina, which have come to be considered as natural therefore outside the social. Even if the vagina does not make a woman, it contributes towards making her, at least in certain circumstances, just as a penis contributes towards the constitution of a man: ‘Bodies do not oppose social performances, but are part of them.’ (24) The point is that collaborators have biology just like gendered subjects making it necessary to think how this and other characteristics might delimit collaborator subjectivity. Though I remain unsure quite how to tackle this in my research, it seems prudent to at least acknowledge identity as a compound-complex phenomenon comprised of but not limited to gender, ethnicity, class and so on. Another problem with Butler’s approach to the phenomenology of acts and by extension performativity is that it does not take other contingencies into consideration. Butler does not consider how space within the performance is constituted anymore than she accounts for the ways in which others involved in a performance might interpret the performative act. Moya Lloyd’s much anticipated critique, Judith Butler: From norms to politics has just been published and is indispensable reading for thinking through the limitations of gender performativity as a model for theorizing the collaborative act and, by extension, collaborator subjectivity.
Increasingly, I find myself conceptualizing collaboration in terms of theory, which begs the question: how to fuse this with practice? Where’s the praxis? Admittedly, theories are emerging in relation to my personal experience…which perhaps explains my compulsion to theorize them as a way of making them universal (?) There are necessary limits to this subjectivity…or perhaps not. Butler reminds me that: Indeed, the feminist impulse…and I am sure there is more than one, has often emerged in recognition that my pain or my silence or my anger or my perception is finally not mine alone, and that it delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me in certain unanticipated ways. The personal is thus implicitly political inasmuch as it is conditions by shared social structures, but the personal has also been immunized against political challenge to the extent that public/private distinctions endure.” (124) So the personal is political and, like most things political, there’s signification in the spin. Still, I am hard pressed to know where to draw the line—what to keep to myself. The feedback I receive on my research fingers my investigations into the texture of collaboration (including the intersubjective exchanges involved in this work) as perhaps the most interesting and original. While exciting (it is thrilling to have a clear focus at last) there are many ways to write this discussion. Mary Anne and I agree it would behoove me to think through various means of describing/negotiating this reflection in my work. Enter Donald Schön, whose Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action I will tackle in a subsequent digest. Like feminism, collaboration is bound up with the a “shared social structure.” Certainly, collaborations are fashioned (sometimes but not always by their members) in relation to society or, more accurately, as part of society in the absence of an outside. But some also attempt something “better,” an alternative to preexisting structures. (I am thinking about the historical avant-garde’s experiments of the early 20th century). These alternative structures may nurture different types of community but this does not mean they impact society by extension. Recognizing the tension between the collaborative community and social structures seems critical if one is to understand the ways in which individuals might negotiate these two spheres through their acts of collaboration…all this seems very much related to the point above about the limits of the act. In this case, however, the limits are the scalability of the individual’s experience…including my own. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” In The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader. 2nded. Edited by Michael Huxley and Noel Witts. London: Routledge, 1996. Callon, Michel. “What does it mean to say that economics is performative?” In Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, edited by Donald Mackenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu, 311-358. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goffmann, Irving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday,1959. Paglia, Camille. Interview by Daniel Nester, Bookslut, April 2005, http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_04_005030.php [accessed March 30, 2008]. Turkle, Sherry. “Introduction: Identity in the Age of the Internet.” In Life on the Screen. 9-26. New York: Touchstone, 1997. return to Practice Literature |
comments I'd like to know what took you - or got you - to this text. And straight away, there are also some things that I'd like to have explained e.g. 'illuctionary gestures' (sound good - but what are they?) I’m a bit confused by the bit about ‘gender constitution through performative acts’: surely, according to B there isn’t a subject before such ‘acts’ to be continuous? And why does the assertion of something like a ‘moral law’ of gender make subject of these acts ‘discontinuous’. 4th paragraph: we move from the ‘subject’ to its ‘body’. Does B claim that ‘the body’ is a socialized aspect of subjectivity? If so, it’s strange that we haven’t seen more mutations in categories of gendered bodies, historically speaking. Rather, what we seem to see, so often, is a use of a supposedly ‘foundational’ (as in anatomical) gender for social inscription. Or another way of putting this is to say: one’s anatomy only allows one to be (‘normatively’) male or female and those categories are tied to perceived anatomical identifiers. But Foucault could be useful here - ‘History of Sexuality’… 5th paragraph: I’m confused about where your account of B is going. You seem to be asking 2 questions – one about phenomenology’s value to Butler and another about the use of performativity and feminism for you! 6th paragraph: Wow – a real leap! ‘Essentialism’ being the thread of continuity… There’s a huge political point here – about transformational, democratic politics and where one ‘has’ to start from in order to bring democracy about. You could say that it’s the difficult discourse of ‘equal opportunities’ writ large. That is to say: in facilitating equality, does one a) treat everyone as equal or b) compensate difference or both (which becomes very complex)? It’s a key issue for the way in which CP approaches ‘openness’. I’d really like to know more about comparisons between Goffman, Turckle and Butler… 10th paragraph: Ah, good a more Foucaultian perspective…! 11th paragraph – I could do with more on the distinction between ‘performative’ and ‘expressive’ identity – as it rests on a notion of performativity in the tradition of Searle and the idea of speech-acts… I love this cultural history of ‘collaboration’. Yes, the word has indeed gone through a ‘U’ turn, which should make us cautious. 12th: but surely, the idea of ‘acts’ (via phenomenology) applies to all forms of subjectivity / being in the world? 13th: Paglia’s critique is unfair: if one ‘believes in’ speech acts etc. one has to deny the facticity of the body. You can do this also via certain forms of pragmatism: Davidson and Rorty. We don’t ‘have to have’ biology…theoretically speaking. It’s just often thrust upon us. 16th: so why not start with Moya Lloyd! It seems to me that what would be useful in all of this, is a more(?!) über-theory of social-agency. Bullet points: these seem to get to the philosophical core of your research and are well-identified and the JB quote is v pertinent. The issues of where / in what you ‘ground’ your research is only one that you can decide, but putting it crudely – it’s a choice of ‘experience’ / ‘theory’ or ‘practice’ – or to complicate that, in a hybridization of some or all of these. |
